TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team continues to lead a dramatic Rally del Paraguay with Sébastien Ogier fighting back to head the leaderboard with one day to go.
Saturday’s route was shorter than Friday’s – with 112.78 competitive kilometres to be driven across seven stages west of Encarnacíon – but was marked by a different character and a looser gravel surface.
Kalle Rovanperä led coming into the day and started the morning with a stage win in SS9, took another in SS11, and had increased his advantage to 16.7 seconds by the end of the morning loop. Ogier meanwhile continued his fightback from tyre damage sustained on Friday morning, winning the other two stages in the loop and closing to within half a second of second-placed Adrien Fourmaux (Hyundai) arriving back into Encarnacíon for mid-day service.
Ogier took second place emphatically with a stage win in the first test of the afternoon, and would then gain the rally lead in SS14 when Rovanperä was slowed significantly by front-right tyre damage, dropping two and a half minutes.
At the end of the day, Ogier’s advantage stands at 10.3s over Fourmaux. Elfyn Evans is up into third overall after a trouble-free day, with 2.5s in hand over fourth-placed Ott Tänak (Hyundai).
Rovanperä is now sixth, one place ahead of Sami Pajari who continued his learning at Rally1 level after the time he lost changing a tyre on Friday afternoon. Takamoto Katsuta restarted this morning after the damage he sustained on the opening day, and faced the loosest conditions running first on the road.
In WRC2, Oliver Solberg has been fighting back from a slow puncture of his own on Friday morning, and climbed to second in the class – just 6.5s from the lead – after 12 consecutive stage wins in his Printsport-run GR Yaris Rally2.
Quotes:
Juha Kankkunen (Deputy Team Principal)
“It’s certainly been another up-and-down day today. As a team we are still in a good position in the fight but it is still very tight, and tomorrow is going to be a difficult day for everyone. Seb is such a good and experienced driver. When the conditions are difficult he knows the right speed to take and here he is now back in the lead. It’s been a good clean day for Elfyn too, moving up to third. It was unfortunate that Kalle lost so much time but there are extra points to go for tomorrow and he’ll do his best to fight for those. It’s going to be an interesting day and an exciting one to follow.”
Elfyn Evans (Driver car 33)
“It’s not been the easiest day but we did what we could. I’ve still been struggling to find a good feeling, especially when the stages are more technical. But we had a clean day and were able to stay out of trouble and gain a couple of places. Ott is pushing pretty hard and will be tough to keep behind us tomorrow, but we’ll give it a good shot. We’ll keep working tonight to try and find some extra speed and aim to maximise our points tomorrow.”
Kalle Rovanperä (Driver car 69)
“Obviously this was not what we were hoping for today. Things had been going OK; we made some changes with the car last night and the balance had been better than yesterday. We have seen this weekend that the puncture risk has been quite high, and for us it happened so early in the stage that we lost a lot of time. Looking back, we should have stopped to change it, but it wouldn’t have made a difference to our position now. It’s disappointing, but let’s see what the conditions are like tomorrow and what we can do to take back some points.”
Sébastien Ogier (Driver car 17)
“It was a pity to see what happened to Kalle; you never want to take the lead from a team-mate in that way. Most of us have had issues with tyres at some point this weekend and unfortunately Kalle’s was more costly. Since we had ours yesterday, we’ve pushed and maximised everything we can and we can be happy with that. It’s nice that we’ve managed to come back to where we are now but it’s definitely not over. Tomorrow we have the longest loop of the weekend, with maybe some rain in the forecast, so many things can still happen.”
Takamoto Katsuta (Driver car 18)
“Thank you to the team for fixing the car so that we could restart today. Running first on the road we had to do a lot of road cleaning, as we had expected with the different surface of today’s stages, so it was hard to know how much pace we had compared to the top drivers. Still, it was a good learning day. The surface here is very specific and difficult to judge so it’s important to learn about it. We tried many different things with the setup and learned some good things.”
Sami Pajari (Driver car 5)
“Today we didn’t really have anything to fight for in terms of position but we still tried to do what we could. We were running second on the road for most of the day with some tricky conditions, so it was not so easy to compare the pace. But we tried to keep up some proper speed and have some good confidence, while also trying some things with the car, and we’ll aim to continue like that tomorrow.”
End of day two (Saturday):
1 Sébastien Ogier/Vincent Landais (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1) 2h17m20.5s
2 Adrien Fourmaux/Alexandre Coria (Hyundai i20 N Rally1) +10.3s
3 Elfyn Evans/Scott Martin (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1) +36.6s
4 Ott Tänak/Martin Järveoja (Hyundai i20 N Rally1) +39.1s
5 Thierry Neuville/Martijn Wydaeghe (Hyundai i20 N Rally1) +46.8s
6 Kalle Rovanperä/Jonne Halttunen (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1) +2m21.2s
7 Sami Pajari/Marko Salminen (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1) +3m16.2s
8 Robert Virves/Jakko Viilo (Škoda Fabia RS Rally2) +5m30.8s
9 Oliver Solberg/Elliott Edmondson (Toyota GR Yaris Rally2) +5m37.3s
10 Yohan Rossel/Arnaud Dunand (Citroën C3 Rally2) +5m38.0s
20 Takamoto Katsuta/Aaron Johnston (Toyota GR YARIS Rally1) +21m54.2s
(Results as of 17:30 on Saturday, for the latest results please visit www.wrc.com)
What's next?
Sunday’s final leg is formed by a pair of stages north-east of Encarnacíon, which will both be run twice without service inbetween, for a total of 79.5 competitive kilometres. The second pass of Mision Jesuitica Trinidad – finishing at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the same name – serves as the rally ending Power Stage.
Follow us!
Follow TOYOTA GAZOO Racing WRT:
∇Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TOYOTAGAZOORacingWRC
∇X: https://x.com/TGR_WRC (@TGR_WRC)
∇Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tgr_wrc/ (@TGR_WRC)
∇YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TOYOTAGAZOORacingJPchannel
Rd.10 Rally del Paraguay
TOYOTA GAZOO Racing WRC 2025 Official Partners
